On my first day at a professional services company, I was asked to help on a bid for a Criminal Information System. An Operational Requirement (OR) had dropped through the letter box unexpectedly. It was a very good OR with clear functional and non-functional requirements. We had no relationship with the Force and had never developed a police information system before. We had no information on the size of the budget or how many Vendors had been invited to propose. Conventional wisdom said No bid . What we did have in our favour was a charismatic principal, a technical architect who was very able and convincing, and me a software engineer in his first commercial IT job who was keen to make an impression. We decided to bid. I designed the database, using a file management system with B-tree indexes. My previous experience was in real-time systems; I had never worked on a system with a disc drive before, let alone a database. We worked hard. We worked nights and weekends. We wrote a detailed and persuasive proposal. I nearly fell asleep at the wheel driving the proposal to Norwich after working all night typing, copying and binding. We won the business.

Years later, I was working for another services company when another police ITT arrived unannounced. We had no relationship with the client and little recent experience in this sector which is perceived as a disadvantage by Buyers in this marketplace. The requirements were expressed at...